Members of the audience stood and for several minutes, applauded, hooted, hollered, whistled and screamed out their joy at Munro’s accomplishment.

Authors from around the world paid tribute to Harbourfront Festival and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro on Saturday night at the closing night ceremony of the International Festival of Authors. Munro, 82, who is living in Victoria for the winter, could not attend the event because of her frail health.

Nobel Prize in Literature winner Alice Munro has launched a new Canadian tradition, her publisher Douglas Gibson said Saturday night, at the packed closing night tribute to her at the International Festival of Authors.

The tradition is a question everyone is asking of each other: “Where were you when you heard the news of Alice Munro winning?” he joked. “Cars apparently drove off the road.” But he noted he’s heard serious anecdotes of judges at a conference who interrupted proceedings to stand up and applaud the news when they heard it, as did others.

Across Canada, millions have celebrated in individual ceremonies, Gibson said. Glasses of wine have been raised to her over lunches. “But there’s been no official public celebration for Alice Munro – until tonight,” he said.

Then members of the audience stood and for several minutes, applauded, hooted, hollered, whistled and screamed out their joy at Munro’s accomplishment – all for her to see herself on the tape the festival is sending to her of the evening’s event.

Gibson joked the crowd was so loud it perhaps could be heard in Victoria, where the 82-year-old, who was too frail to travel to the tribute Saturday night, is spending the winter. She won’t be able to travel to Stockholm on Dec. 10, either, to receive her Nobel Prize, but her daughter Jenny will travel there on her behalf.

On Saturday night, Avie Bennett, the former owner of Munro’s publishers – McClelland & Stewart, received the Harbourfront Festival Award of $10,000 on her behalf from festival director Geoffrey Taylor. The prize was announced in September, just prior to her winning the Nobel, valued at around $1 million, on Oct. 10. Both prizes come on the heels of Munro announcing earlier this year that she will not be writing anymore.

But, oh, the writing she has done, witnessed by writers like the U.K.’s Margaret Drabble, Ireland’s Colum McCann and Canada’s Alistair MacLeod, Miriam Toews, and Jane Urquhart reading their favourite portions of her writing Saturday night. Others, who sent their regrets were Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, Gibson said.

Miriam Toews told of discovering Alice Munro’s rather racy writing when she was 12, hidden in her older sister’s room between other tomes. She described Munro’s collection of The Lives of Girls and Women, about a young woman in search of love and sexual experience, as “bad ass literature,” something she had to hide from her parents.

But she said, after reading a portion to the audience, that it “gave light...and earthy substance to my own fantasies. It initiated me into the life of literature,” said Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness which was a Scotiabank Giller prize finalist and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. “And I am grateful for her exquisite company.”

Colum McCann, winner of the National Book and IMPAC Dublin Literary awards, read from Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a woman who is facing Alzheimer’s Disease. The story was later made into the movie Away from Her, by Canadian director and actress Sarah Polley.

McCann described novels as explosions that can go off in all directions. He said he sees the short story that the Nobel Prize committee noted Munro was a master of, as an implosion. “A white hot star.”

“If anyone is the supreme chef of this white star, it is Alice Munro,” McCann said. He said her stories force readers to “go through the dark to negotiate the light…I see her as the antidote…to despair,” he said.

“She applauds the vitality and resilience of the human spirit.”

The festival wraps up Sunday with events of reading and discussions running from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Details are at ifoa.org.

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